How fantastic user onboarding turns Hotjar's users into fans

Lore Nuyens

UX Expert

Being User Experience Designers, we’ll instantly recognize a great experience when we see it. And the experience Hotjar is offering its users is an absolute dream.

As our UX Strategist, Johan Verhaegen, wrote earlier, the best strategy for measuring the success of your product is a good mix of quantitative and qualitative research. We use Hotjar to gather quantitative user feedback on websites. Thanks to the heatmaps, you’ll gain insight into what your visitors are doing on your website, and using the built-in surveys, you can also find out why your visitors are doing what they’re doing.

Hotjar is an all-in-one tool for analytics & feedback

We’re excited not only about what this tool can do, but also about how easy it is for users to get the hang of it. The technical term for this would be: excellent user onboarding. And whenever we’re excited, we’re happy to share our enthusiasm. So here’s our experience with the tool.

A new tool! How can we make the most of it?

Our Hotjar journey went as follows:

As soon as you log in as a new user, you’ll instantly notice the great amount of useful documentation Hotjar has in its Support section. Many tools don’t put much effort into their support section, but Hotjar really shows them how it’s done.

Most important is the fact that Hotjar communicates its intentions and reasoning very clearly. This knowledge will help you make the most of the combination of analytics and feedback. And such information is golden, because you want to know what is happening on your website, but also – and most of all – how users are visiting your website.

Learning to work with a new tool can be quite overwhelming. There’s so much information, you’re not really sure where to start. But with Hotjar it’s really easy.

You just hit the road with the Hotjar action plan and the 8 heatmap tests. This is something to go on and helps you make the right choices, right from the start.

Follow Hotjar’s lead and find out everything there is to know about the Hotjar philosophy

The blog Outside the Jar and the webinars will help you further expand your knowledge. We clearly weren’t the 1st user to have questions.

For example, Hotjar is already limited to samples, but even then you’ll quickly get to some 2,000 recordings. You can’t watch them all, can you? So how do you decide which ones to watch?

Hotjar makes the following suggestion:

Define 1 or more flows the users go through.

Watch the movies of the pages where you lose the highest number of users.

Also watch the movies of users that do complete the entire flow. The areas where they are in doubt or do strange things, are areas with room for improvement.

And then there’s the follow up e-mails about the Hotjar action plan. Every 2 to 3 days, you’ll get a new e-mail, explaining a new step, with clear instructions, a few examples and links to the website.

Hotjar sends out 9 follow-up e-mails, for every step of the Hotjar action plan

Thanks to this constant follow-up and tips, we certainly learned a thing or two. And every e-mail was an incentive to dive back into Hotjar and try out some things.

The combination of quantitative data, surveys, recordings, funnels, etc. makes Hotjar a great tool. But the difference with other similar tools isn’t only in the functionality. It’s also the way in which they guide users to gain insight and make the most of the tool.

And Hotjar has found the way to prove at least one important point: good user onboarding will turn your customers into real fans!